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 Telling Our Story of Love |
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24 December 2006 A little boy asked his mother where he came from, and also where she had come from as a baby. His mother gave him a tall tale about a beautiful white-feathered bird. The boy asked his grandmother the same question and received a variation on the bird story. Outside to his playmate he said, "You know, there hasn’t been a normal birth in our family for three generations."[1] The little boy would have reached the same conclusion from reading the Bible. Unusual births are the stuff of Jewish and Christian writers alike. Throughout this Advent season, we have followed the story of Jesus as Luke tells it. He doesn’t tell it the way Mark tells it. He doesn’t tell it the way Matthew tells it. He certainly doesn’t tell it the way John tells it. Because it is in Luke–and only in Luke that we have the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth and John, with the birth of John the baptizer mirroring the birth of Jesus at every point. Even the point of the non-family name, and the presentation of the child at the temple on the eighth day, even these embellishments are part of Luke’s carefully-constructed story. Because, of course, Luke is not giving us an historical accounting of Jesus’ birth. CNN was another 2000 years in the making. What Luke does give us is one of the most compelling birth stories in Christian literature. What Luke gives us is a theological framing for his story of Jesus. It is a thoroughly Jewish story; a thoroughly Christian story. And it is our story. It is the story that shapes us and shapes the reality of our world–and I don’t need to remind you that this reality is different than that of our Hindu brothers and Muslim sisters. So on this fourth Sunday of Advent–coincidentally the same day as Christmas Eve–we come together as more than just a collection of individuals crowding together for warmth. We come together in the common story that gives perspective to our present reality, that gives us theological grounding in a rapidly changing culture. It is the story of our covenantal relationship with God and with one another made known to us through Jesus the Christ.[3] Over the course of these past four weeks, we have explored that story as it is framed by Jesus’ birth in the gospel according to Luke. This evening, we will tell the story of Jesus’ birth itself. But this morning, we read the story of another birth, another naming, another celebration–the story of John’s birth as the final chapter before Jesus’ birth. It’s almost as if Luke wants us to slow down, to savor the nuances of the rich narrative he has been spinning out for us as we have listened to these during Advent weeks. So once again we pick up the thread of the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah that begins Luke’s gospel. Elizabeth gives birth, and relatives and neighbors rejoice. Then as the good Jewish parents they are, Zechariah and Elizabeth come to circumcise their son on his eighth day. The neighbors assume these proud parents will call the boy Zechariah, but Elizabeth responds that the boy’s name is John. Apparently her word is not sufficient. The neighbors turn to Zechariah, who has been unable to speak since the day nine months before, when he questioned the news-bearing angel about the improbability of becoming a father. On a writing tablet, Zechariah confirms Elizabeth’s pronouncement, and with that confirmation, Zechariah once again is able to speak. Like Mary, his speech is a hymn of praise, and the themes of his praise echo those of Mary’s song.[2,38] At the same time, Zechariah’s hymn of praise is fitting for a priest of Israel, lifting up themes of Israel’s longing and hope and confidence.[2,38] That longing and hope and confidence are part of the fabric of Jewish faith. Two millennia later, Susannah Heschel writes, “when a baby is born to Jewish parents, the child brings hope for future life. A birth is a miraculous moment, since every Jewish parent knows their baby might be the Messiah.”[3] As we learned in the song of Mary, Zechariah’s confidence in God’s faithfulness is no Pollyanna anachronism. Luke’s community has just survived the Roman-Jewish war of 66-70. Richard Swanson visualizes the consequences of that war. “Luke’s community, both audience and storyteller, is gathered in the ruins of the Temple and stands there shocked and chastened by the disaster. All of what was a rich and diverse Jewish community was rammed through a knothole by Roman force. Thousands of people are dead. The ideals and the mistakes that led to the failed revolt have been analyzed and argued. Causes have been found, sometimes rooted in small words and minor decisions, even offhand disagreements.”[4,42-43] Israel’s trauma of the Babylonian exile some 500 years before is suddenly contemporary. So to praise God as faithful in the face of that destruction, to call on God’s people to serve God in holiness and righteousness without fear, is an act of faithfulness in God’s redeeming love on the one hand–and an act of resistance to Roman authority on the other. We who have been shocked and grieved by disasters as diverse as September 11 and Katrina and Iraq know that chastening. Those disasters have changed our story just as surely as the disasters of the Jewish exile to Babylon and Roman occupation and destruction of Israel and the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust changed the reality of the Jewish world. Our contemporary story will always be different post 9/11, post Katrina, post Iraq. But just as Jesus wasn’t cut out of whole cloth apart from a particular story, neither are we. Jesus stood on the shoulders of John and Isaiah and Micah and Moses just as surely as Martin Luther King Jr stood on the shoulders of A. Philip Randolph and Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. The story of two births – the one we read this morning, the one we will read this evening – is told within a community possibly more shocked and numbed than our own. And Luke’s wondrous framing of that story gives it roots and wings. At the same time Zechariah praises God even in the face of great loss and destruction, he calls on the people to remember their common narrative, to remember who they are and whose they are, so that the future they shape together is faithful to that memory. These people knew anxiety–they sough comfort and security in such simple patterns as naming a son after his father. But through Zechariah, Luke calls the community to continue claiming their story, their identity by giving witness to God’s realm. My friends, we gather this morning to remember. We gather to recover our common story so that we have a perspective on our present reality that does not see our only response to disaster as a show of economic or military force. As Luke tells of Jesus’ birth, the baby John is a child called to be the prophet of the Most High, going before the Lord to prepare the way. Perhaps one of you remembers a television special a number of years ago addressing the experience of African American slaves. The scene showed a mother with her infant son, saying that with every birth came the question–is this the one? Is this the one who will deliver us? Is this the one who will lead us to freedom? Luke reminds us that each child, each faith community is called to that vision, called to go before the Lord to prepare the way, regardless of the chaos and the violence that define our time. It is a high calling that comes to us each time we hear a baby’s cry or feel those tiny fingers clasp one of our own. *** [1]Howard Hendricks, quoted in Homemade, September, 1989. SermonCentral.com |